Obama Gives Canadian Company $1.4 Billion for Broken Obamacare Website

While Obamacare opened its doors this week, the website to enroll in the new healthcare system, healthcare.gov, was operating so poorly, that Americans found it nearly impossible to sign up.

A Canadian company was given the task of creating the online exchanges in addition to other contracted work for the Obama administration. Since 2009, CGI Federal, which is a subsidiary of the Montreal-based CGI Group, has garnered over $1.4 billion in government contracts.

CGI is also deeply involved with Canada’s healthcare system—a single-payer system. The company offers IT services to a variety of healthcare exchanges in Canada, as well as Canada’s national health provider, Health Canada. Like the U.S., CGI also has control of Canada’s healthcare website.

Since the Affordable Care Act became law, progress on its implementation has been criticized. Major deadlines weren’t met and this week as the online system crashed.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services paid CGI $645 million in contracts. Additionally, CGI received $254 million from the Defense Department, $58 million from the EPA, $36 million from the Justice Department and $35 million from the General Services Administration.

To compare these astronomical figures to another presidency—in 2008, under Pres. George W. Bush, CGI only received $16.5 billion in total contracts from all U.S. agencies.